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Sep 2, 2018

Media pounce on conservatives and weaponize bias against Trump

Anti-Trump news organizations continued to attack the president this
past week on many fronts, including for what CNN Senior Political
Analyst John Avlon called “a real culture of corruption.” In reality,
Avlon should have been describing the state of journalism.
CNN, that stalwart of James Earl Jones voiceovers, has no room to point
fingers. It got caught believing another phony story about President
Trump and is too stubborn and woke to admit it. (Sort of like when three
CNN investigative journalists had to resign in 2017, except then the
network admitted they were wrong.)

Meanwhile, NBC is facing allegations from a former top producer that
executives actively interfered in reporting on allegations of sexual
misconduct against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. And The New York
Times has become increasingly obvious about the word play it injects
into news stories, so its left-wing agenda remains intact.

There are far too many failure points in the media to fit easily into
one column – journalists ignoring Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto
O’Rourke’s past DUI arrest; hypocritical outlets that claim to love
Republicans only after they pass away; and repeated defenses of Antifa.

If Avlon wanted to find his culture of corruption, he might start at
NBC. The peacock network used to employ Ronan Farrow, who was digging
into the Weinstein story. Only, as he got close, the bosses shut him
down. He was forced to publish his investigative report and won a
Pulitzer Prize.

Turns out it was deliberate. Both The New York Times and Daily Beast had
scoops out this week showing how NBC executives tried to silence the
Weinstein story. (Just don’t call this media bias!)

Former NBC investigative producer Rich McHugh told The Times that “the
network’s handling of the matter ‘a massive breach of journalistic
integrity.’” McHugh said he and Farrow were ordered to “stand down”
three days before interviewing “a woman with a credible rape allegation
against Harvey Weinstein.”

The Daily Beast piled on, writing: “Sources: NBC Threatened Ronan Farrow
if He Kept Reporting on Harvey Weinstein.” The Beast explained:
“According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, NBC News
General Counsel Susan Weiner made a series of phone calls to Farrow,
threatening to smear him if he continued to report on Weinstein.”

Farrow said he suspected NBC News President Noah Oppenheim “who
moonlighted as a Hollywood screenwriter – was potentially communicating
with Weinstein directly about the story, according to the sources.”

NBC went on to have its own internal #MeToo problem with “Today” anchor
Matt Lauer, who was forced out in a huge sexual misconduct scandal.

NBC is still playing games on air – in the very same “Today” show.
Friday, it spent just one minute and eight seconds on a report and 43
seconds of that time defending NBC.

“Meet The Press Daily” host Chuck Todd on MSNBC blundered into this
fiasco by leveraging another story to pretend media bias doesn’t exist.

Todd said: “One of the mistakes we in the mainstream media made during
when these false allegations against us for being biased for 40 years
happened is we started believing, ‘Oh, maybe we are biased.’ ‘Oh, wait,
we can’t look biased.’ So, then, we created a lot of false equivalency
issues.”

Sure, Chuck. Sure.

2. Speaking of Blunders: Most journalists know that a
too-good-to-be-true scoop seldom is. But they keep falling for them to
aid the Resistance.

That hasn’t stopped CNN, as the network refuses to admit it ran another
bogus story about President Trump. Here’s AP’s David Bauder describing
the problem: “Despite a key source backing off his assertion, CNN is
sticking by a story casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s claim that
he did not have prior knowledge of a June 2016 meeting with a Russian
lawyer to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton.” Broadcast
networks went bonkers after the original report, devoting more than 39
minutes to it during morning and evening newscasts in the last week of
July.

The key source is Lanny Davis, the lawyer for Trump’s former attorney
Michael Cohen. Davis now says he was wrong when he gave CNN the
information. CNN’s reporting team, including former Washington Post
Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, said on the July 26 broadcast of
“Cuomo Prime Time” that Cohen would rat out Trump. He was supposed to
tell investigators “Mr. Trump knew in advance about a now infamous June
2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Russians were expected to offer
damaging information on Hillary Clinton,” the New York Times reported.

Davis first denied on air at CNN that he was the source for this story.
Then he fessed up, firing a torpedo at the network’s “scoop.” Yet it
took the broadcast networks about a week to carefully distance
themselves from this disaster. But CNN has held on for dear life.

The Washington Post published a long article dissecting CNN’s weird
sourcing of the story, where Davis provided information on background
but was then cited as declining to comment. The Post made it clear that
“critics say the practice is murky at best and ethically dubious at
worst.”

The result is even fellow liberal outlets have distanced themselves from
CNN. Newsweek wrote: “CNN REFUSES TO BACK DOWN FROM COHEN, TRUMP TOWER
STORY DESPITE LANNY DAVIS SAYING INFO MAY BE WRONG.” And Politico gutted
CNN’s source as well, “Lanny Davis burns reporters. Should they still
give him a megaphone?” (Hint: No!)

Trump has accused CNN of a “major lie” and called it “FAKE NEWS,” of
course. CNN hasn’t given up … yet. The Daily Caller described its
defense as “CNN QUADRUPLES DOWN ON DUBIOUS TRUMP STORY.” Next headline
is quintuples.

3. Weaponizing Journalism: It wasn’t enough for The New York Times to
claim conservatives had “Weaponized the First Amendment.” How dare those
right-wingers expect equal treatment under the law? Now they’re accused
of using the Catholic Church’s sex scandal in a similar manner.

The ridiculously biased piece was headlined: “Vatican Power Struggle
Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce.” (Note how conservatives
“pounce!&rdquo Poor Pope Francis is faced with a crisis because “an
ideologically motivated opposition has weaponized the church’s sex abuse
crisis to threaten not only Francis’ agenda but his entire papacy.”

This was a common theme in media as major outlets like The Times and
Washington Post targeted conservative Catholic media to defend the
pope’s liberal social agenda.

The Times’ weaponization of journalism doesn’t just stick to social
issues. It has even warned how the Internal Revenue Service “could be
weaponized for political purposes.” That’s apparently only a problem
when Republicans do it, not Democrats.

4. Graphic Objection: Sometimes media bias is so bad, it takes a lawyer
to object. Kudos to the lawyer in question, Ted Frank, director of
litigation for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Frank spotted a
horribly screwed-up New York Times graphic about the number of appellate
judges confirmed during a president’s first congressional session.

The chart ranged from 15 (Obama) to 24 (Trump), yet Trump’s gavel was,
well, huge. “Today, the New York Times taught me that 24 is over ten
times larger than 15,” wrote Frank. He was right. It was the kind of
graphic you could only make if you are trying to make Trump’s 60-percent
increase appear like a judicial apocalypse.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/37610